Making Your Bed
by SpoonyAzul
Summary: After a year in therapy, Ramona Cassidy is ready to start a new life. Unfortunately for her mother, it starts in a military program. Mostly OCs with an appearance from the Director.


**Making Your Bed**

Outside a hospital room, an older woman with graying hair and green eyes looked on from the window, watching a young woman with dark auburn hair and blue eyes moving her artificial arm as a part of her therapy. She moved it up, down, left, right and every other direction, along with the motions of punching and grappling that she learned from her father.

The young woman was a soldier on shore leave when the Covenant invaded and glassed their planet. Fruitlessly, she fought back and her punishment was her arm lopped off with an energy blade.

As an artificial limb and robotics expert, Dr. Nora Cassidy had seen this countless times before with patients undergoing therapy after prosthetic implantation.

However, it was different this time. The young woman was also her daughter, Ramona and it wasn't a typical implant. This prototype artificial limb had to mimic the natural movement of a normal human arm. In order to do that, the doctors amputated up to her girl's shoulder to insert the socket and connect miniscule wires to her nervous system.

So, as a medical doctor and also her mother, Nora performed the surgery herself. It took hours and hours of cutting and pinpointing tiny nerves to even smaller wires, but she got it done. When it was over, she painstakingly watched as Ramona went through countless fever dreams while recovering from the surgery.

After watching her writhe in pain for several months, Nora didn't know what was worse...

...the fact that she used her own daughter as a test subject...

...or the fact that she volunteered, not knowing of the experiment she was a part of.

Almost a year later, Ramona's recovery gave the mother a huge wave of relief to see her walking around and no longer trapped inside a fever dream. She had nearly mastered the use of her artificial limb, moving it as naturally as if it were an actual appendage.

A man from the UNSC had also watched her daughter's progress alongside Nora. He first arrived six months into the young woman's therapy and just stood silently while she learned the basic movements and went on to the advanced ones, including relearning hand-to-hand combat. Today was no different when he arrived and stood next to her, watching Ramona going through the motions of her new limb.

"Your work is immaculate, Dr. Cassidy." The man spoke with a subtle southern accent, an accent she heard numerous times.

"Thank you," she replied, her stone face coming back, turning to the man, "but I doubt you came here to compliment me on my work, Dr. Church."

"You never were one for small talk." the man replied, immediately cutting to the chase, "I've come to tell you that the necessary arrangements have been made. As soon as your daughter recovers, I gladly would take her in as a candidate for my project."

Nora went back to her daughter, who was still practicing her punching with her metallic limb while performing hand-to-hand combat. Maybe the mother side of her was showing, but Nora had a sour feeling of bitterness in the pit of her stomach. Not only did she experiment on her own child, she was giving her away to a military project. It was something that Ramona knew when she volunteered, when the Chairman gave the renowned Dr. Cassidy the materials needed for the procedure.

"Better you than anyone else," the female doctor quipped, "I hardly trust anyone these days, Leonard. With humanity recovering from the Great War and all the bureaucracy from the Oversight Committee..."

"I understand," Dr. Church interrupted, "that letting go of a loved one can be...difficult, but..."

"No," Dr. Cassidy turned to Leonard, an angry expression now on her face, pointing to Ramona through the window, "No, you don't, Leonard. The young woman in that room isn't some super soldier or war hero that you can just experiment on. This is my daughter we're talking about! My only child! What the hell do you know about letting loved ones go?"

Dr. Church flinched at this sudden outburst from his colleague. Her stone exterior had now shattered into pieces just at the mere mention of her child. He just stood silently while Dr. Cassidy just vented, her motherly side poured out like an overflowing faucet. It was as if she had held these feelings anger and frustration inside for a long time and now wanted to let someone know how she felt.

Then she let out a humorless laugh, "You want to know what the worst part about all this? I let this happen. I allowed it to happen because my daughter wanted the use of her right arm again. I knew the Chairman would use her as an experiment when he gave me what I needed. I knew that she would become a plaything for your own selfish ambitions. I knew that she wouldn't take no for an answer, no matter what I said."

Then she bitterly added, "Just like her damn father."

When it looked like she was done, Leonard could've sworn she was on the verge of tears. Then again, giving your child to an unknown military experiment would make any mother fanatic with worry.

"Nora," Dr. Church rested a hand on her shoulder, "Your daughter knew what she getting herself into when she volunteered for the procedure. She knew that if it wasn't her, it would be someone else, some other soldier unlucky enough to lose a limb after a Covenant attack."

Nora pushed his hand off her shoulder, his words obviously not comforting her at all. She looked back at her daughter, still practicing hand-to-hand combat before a doctor, along his team of nurses, ordered his patient to get back in bed, which Ramona begrudgingly complied.

_Just like her father..._

Her stone face returned when she turned back to Dr. Church, "Don't give her any special treatment. Treat her as if she's a normal soldier. That message was from her father."

Dr. Church simply nodded and turned to the window, "I will put that under advisement. Tell me, Nora, how much longer will she be in therapy?"

"I've talked to the doctors." Dr. Cassidy replied, "They've told me she will be released tomorrow, but John wants to teach her a few things before she's turned over to your project. He needs a few days."

Dr. Church nodded again, "I see no problem with that, as long as she's willing to do this. For now, I have to go. I have business to attend to. Goodbye, Dr. Cassidy."

With that, he turned on his heels and left the room, leaving Nora to her thoughts. She glanced over at Ramona before she left as well. On her way back to her car, that sour feeling she felt earlier hadn't gone away, though it changed from bitterness to worry.

The mother side of her started tugging at the back of her mind again. Would Ramona be alive six months from now? A year? What about maintenance on her arm? What if something went wrong?

She shoved those thoughts out of her head and knew she couldn't change anything now.

Nora Cassidy had made her bed.

Now she would have to lie in it.

**Author's Notes: **

I wrote this for a RvBFics challenge because someone kept nagging at me to do it. While I was doing it for fun, I felt like I had to put some thought into it.

So, when I started writing this fanfic, I had planned from the beginning that My OC would have a prosthetic, my main inspiration being Edward Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist and later Kat from Halo: Reach.

Going for realism here, I knew that a human being wouldn't be fine the next day after having a metal arm strapped to him/her. I went to the Fullmetal Alchemist Wiki on the subject of Automail to try to get an idea of how a prosthetic works and how much time she needed to recover. Also, she needed to feel the side effects, from the high fever to relearning basic movements with a prosthetic.

The challenge was show a backstory as to how a canon character or an OC joined Project Freelancer. I went through so many ideas, from volunteering to drunken bar fight, until I settled on "Labelled as a Military experiment, sent to PF after recovery."

One problem I had was perspective, from whose eyes should I tell it from. I didn't want to write from Ramona's point of view and three other fanfics had the Director. So, thinking outside the box mixed with a little inspiration from Sherlock Holmes novels, I chose a third party character, the OC's mother who had patched her daughter up and unwillingly sold her to the highest bidder.

The title is something I came up with while looking at idioms and my eyes settled on "Making your Bed and having to lie in it," meaning that a person does something s/he can't reverse and now has to deal with the consequences, which was perfect for this oneshot.

So then I submitted my story to the website and ended up actually winning the first challenge. Needless to say I was floored and realized that I don't suck at writing that bad.

And that's how came to write RvB fanfics.


End file.
